I'm now imagining a "Talk with your AI-powered pets" interface that is a pseudo-ChatGPT style interface that just responds to everything you say with "woof" or "miaow" :D
(I'm surprised that afaik nobody has really cracked the "Tamagotchi" pet care formula on smartphones, which seemed ideally suited to a visually and sonically enhanced version of the same basic ritual)
I think part of the problem of doing it on a smartphone is that software-only breaks the illusion in a way that makes it necessary to go further to counter it. I think people find it harder to connect to something they see as "just software" without any embodiment to the point that we connect more easily to something "dumber" if it's embodied in some way or other or we can imagine it to be.
For that reason, I suspect that to do it with a smartphone, you'd do better with a chatbot talking to users via e.g. Whatsapp or another messenger than a custom app, because people associate messengers with real people rather than a "game".
